"The Great Dictator" Obama Issues Edict To Health Insurers

Hoping to quell a firestorm President Obama announced a change in healthcare policy concerning religion and contraceptives.

Fox News reported:

President Barack Obama, in an abrupt policy shift aimed at quelling an election-year firestorm, announced on Friday that religious employers would not be required to offer free birth control to workers and that the onus would instead be put on insurers.

The compromise sought to accommodate religious organizations, such as Catholic hospitals and universities, outraged by a new rule that would have required them to offer free contraceptive coverage.

Instead, the new approach puts the burden on insurance companies, ordering them to provide workers at religious-affiliated institutions with free family planning if they request it, without involving their employer at all, the White House said.

Well, the problem with this is that although Obama shifted gears, this new plan is no more constitutional than the other one. It really is no change. Who do you think pays for the insurance coverage? The employer and the employee. He has no authority to make an insurer or any business pay for free contraceptives by edict. Governing in this manner makes Obama a dictator.

From Heritage.org:

“It’s very chilling and very dangerous,” Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) told the Heritage Foundation in an interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference. He insisted that the president’s supposed walk-back of the contraception mandate “is all rhetoric” and does not address either the constitutional problems with the mandate or its detriments to freedom of choice for America’s health care consumers.

On the constitutional question, Price said that members of the administration “so believe that they have to have the power to determine what kind health coverage that an individual may get that they’re willing to trample on the First Amendment to the Constitution in order to increase their power.”

To read the full Fox News story, go here.

UPDATE (2/11): From CNSNews.com:

CNSNews.com) - The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement late on Friday declaring that the small alteration President Barack Obama had announced earlier in the day to a regulation that would force all health-care plans in the United States to cover sterilizations and all FDA-approved contraceptives--including those that cause abortion--is 'unacceptable" because, among other things, it does not protect the freedom-of-conscience rights of secular for-profit employers, or secular non-profit employers, or religious insurers, or self-insured religious employers, or individual Americans.

To read the full story, go here.